


Asking Questions

by Anonymous



Category: Shazam! (2019), Shazam! | Captain Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Backstory, Bonding, Canon Disabled Character, Chronic Pain, Disability, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Past Drug Addiction, Superpowers, billy just wants to be a good best friend, freddy has to deal with chronic pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:42:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28465491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “God,” Freddy said, hopping from foot to foot a couple times before leaping a few feet into the air. “You know you’re fucked up whennot being in painis your favourite superpower.”
Relationships: Billy Batson & Freddy Freeman
Comments: 9
Kudos: 72





	Asking Questions

Billy was trying desperately to convince himself to focus on his catch-up math homework when Freddy popped his head into their room.

“Hey,” he said. “You wanna go flying?”

Billy immediately slammed his textbook shut. “ _Yes_ ,” he answered, standing up before Freddy had even stepped into the room. “Let’s go.”

Billy had had his powers for almost six months now, and it still hadn’t gotten old. Every time he transformed still felt like the first time. He spent as much time as he could in his superhero form, patrolling and playing around with his powers and _flying_.

Every member of the Vasquez clan loved their super forms, but the only one who seemed just as addicted to it as Billy was Freddy—actually, Freddy seemed like might be even _more_ addicted to it than Billy, and that was saying something.

Almost every day, they went out flying for hours at a time, sometimes joined by other members of the family, but more often than not just the two of them. Victor and Rosa might have been worried about all the time they were spending away from the house, but they could see how close Billy and Freddy were growing, and how _happy_ they both were these days, and they seemed to cut them some slack.

It was mid-summer, and although it was after dinner, it was still light out, so they had to make sure they were safely hidden before they transformed. They trekked through the neighbourhood, sweaty in the hot summer air. They joked around as they walked, but Freddy was quieter than usual, leaning more heavily on his crutch. Billy wanted to ask him if he was okay, but he still wasn’t good at that. Still wasn’t good at asking people how they were feeling, wasn’t good at being comforting. He was working on it, but it always felt too invasive, too personal, and when things got too personal it still made Billy’s skin crawl.

Hopefully Freddy would perk up when they were flying. Freddy always perked up when they were flying.

They finally rounded a corner to reach a little wooded area down the block from their house that was secluded enough to be a good Shazam spot. Eventually people in the neighbourhood might start to wonder why lightning seemed to strike that one patch of trees almost daily, but they hadn’t heard any complaints so far.

As soon as they were well-hidden by the trees, Freddy tossed his crutch into a bush where he’d retrieve it later, and grabbed onto Billy’s shoulder for support. Billy didn’t question it, just held Freddy’s arm to steady him. They were both used to this routine—Freddy always left his crutch behind when they went out patrolling or flying. Although he’d used it pretty effectively as a club more than once when they’d been caught off guard and Freddy hadn’t had a chance to stash it anywhere, it was definitely an inconvenience to lug it around if he didn’t have to.

“Oh, so our _clothes_ transform with us, but my crutch doesn’t? Pretty ableist,” Freddy had half-joked back when he’d first realized that he’d either have to carry the crutch around or leave it behind somewhere.

Billy had tried to come up with a solution to make carrying around Freddy’s crutch more convenient, but Freddy had only shrugged and said that stashing it whenever they transformed was easiest. He didn’t need it in his superhero form, so as long as he didn’t switch back while they were out, it was fine.

“Ready?” Freddy asked, and before Billy could answer, Freddy was already shouting, “ _Shazam!_ ”

Billy ducked away from Freddy as lightning arced from the sky and slammed into his foster brother’s chest. It was always a little bit awe-inspiring, watching any of his foster siblings transform. Freddy, especially, seemed to revel in the moment of transformation. Billy saw the expression of, not just joy, but _calm_ wash over older Freddy’s face. His whole body seemed to sag with a sort of joyful relief, like someone stepping out of the cold and into a warm bath. He watched Freddy’s normally tense shoulders relax, watched his body unwind as he shook out his arms and cracked his neck.

“God,” Freddy said, hopping from foot to foot a couple times before leaping a few feet into the air. “You know you’re fucked up when _not being in pain_ is your favourite superpower.”

Billy swallowed awkwardly and looked up to see Freddy grinning down at him like what he’d just said was no big deal.

“Hurry up, Batson, let’s get a move on,” Freddy said, snapping his fingers.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t rush me,” Billy said, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. He pushed down the urge to respond to Freddy’s comment. He didn’t know what he’d say, anyways. What could he say? “ _Shazam!_ ”

Seconds later, they were both rocketing up into the sky, racing each other into the clouds. Freddy shrieked with laughter, and Billy tore after him, knowing there was no way he’d catch up. In the sky, Freddy was faster than all of them.

He watched Freddy dip and dive through the air, moving with so much grace it was like he was born to have these powers. Just as Billy had hoped, Freddy had perked up the second they took off into the air. He couldn’t shake what Freddy had said about not being in pain, though.

It wasn’t the first time Freddy had made a quip like that. A few weeks before, all six of them had been sitting around in their Rock of Eternity lair, lounging in their super forms.

Darla had demanded to know what everyone’s favourite thing about being a superhero was, and they’d indulged her, going around the circle and answering like a game of truth or dare. Most of their responses were unsurprising—Pedro liked being strong, Eugene liked feeling like a video game character, Mary liked being able to help people, Billy liked getting to be an adult, Darla liked meeting _celebrities like Santa Claus_. Freddy had gone last, and he’d hemmed and hawed, drawing it out theatrically while Darla bounced in her seat with impatience.

“Hmm… I’m gonna have to say it’s a tie between walking at a normal speed and not having chronic pain,” he finally said, grinning impishly at her.

It was clear the Darla didn’t quite understand, because she’d rolled her eyes and bounced higher in her seat. “Nooo, you have to pick a superpower!” she’d said, and Freddy had laughed.

“Okay, fine, flying. Definitely,” he’d said, and they’d moved on.

But it was clear to Billy, and probably to the other older siblings, that Freddy’s first answer wasn’t a joke, not really. A lot of Freddy’s jokes about himself were like that—a joke, but not really.

* * *

They flew for hours, until even the summer sky started to inch towards dusk. One of the best things about their powers was that they never seemed to get tired—stamina of Atlas and all that. But they’d have to head home eventually. Victor and Rosa were more lenient about curfew during the summer, without school to worry about, but if they stayed out past ten their foster parents would definitely have questions about where they’d been.

Besides, Billy was stuck doing summer school online to make up for years of skipping school and running from every home that tried to make him give a damn about his education. If he wanted to be in Freddy’s grade again next year, he had to actually finish these courses, and he was still horribly behind on his math unit. He really shouldn’t have gone out tonight, but he could never say no to flying. He was bad at saying no to Freddy in general.

So they knew they had to head home soon. But they had a tradition. Most nights, after flying, they’d stop at the convenience store, the same one they’d saved from robbers six months ago, and load up on snacks. Then they’d find a spot high up somewhere—the top of a building, or precariously balanced in a huge tree—and devour their haul before heading home.

As much as he loved flying, Billy almost loved this part of the night more. A chance for him and Freddy to hang out, just the two of them, goofing off and chatting without anyone around to interrupt them. As much as Billy loved the whole Vasquez clan, Freddy had wormed his way into Billy’s heart in a way that no one else had ever managed. It sounded incredibly sappy, and Billy would never _tell_ Freddy this, but Freddy was really Billy’s first best friend. He’d never had a best friend before—he’d barely had _friends_. He’d never stayed anywhere long enough, and he’d never wanted to get close to anyone.

It was like Billy was making up for lost time. He was cramming years of lost friendship into every day he spent with Freddy. And, luckily, Freddy seemed to revel in their time together just as much as Billy did. Sometime Billy worried that he was coming on too strong, that Freddy would feel smothered by how clingy Billy had become in the months since they’d become friends. But Freddy never pushed him away—if anything, Freddy was always pulling him closer. He never went anywhere without asking Billy if he wanted to come, and Billy was grateful every time.

On this particular night, after loading up on doritos and coke zero and sour gummy worms, they flew to one of their favourite spots—the top of the old, abandoned warehouse where they’d first tested out Billy’s powers.

They settled down on the edge of the building, legs dangling in mid-air. Sometimes, when they hung out and snacked, they changed back into their normal forms. But the top of the warehouse was sort of precarious, and Billy figured it would be safer to be in his big-and-strong-and-able-to-fly mode in case the building decided it was finally time to collapse in on itself.

Besides, Freddy hadn’t made any move to switch back, and Billy preferred to match Freddy’s form. There was nothing wrong with one of them being in super form and the other being normal, but it always felt oddly off balance that way, so they rarely did it out of some sort of unspoken agreement.

Freddy took a long swig of coke and then tossed the two-liter at Billy before leaning back on his elbows, his cape fanning out behind him.

“I will literally never get tired of this,” Freddy said happily, letting his eyes drift shut.

“Hard same,” Billy said, grinning as he took a swig from the bottle, too.

He watched the evening breeze tousle Freddy’s curls, which weren’t quite as wild in his super form but were still definitely unruly, and watched the way Freddy turned his face towards the wind and smiled. He seemed so much happier than he had earlier, when they’d been walking through the neighbourhood to their little hideout, and he still couldn’t shake the comment Freddy had made when he’d transformed earlier.

“Hey,” Billy said hesitantly, setting down the bottle next to him. “Are you okay, Freddy?”

Freddy cracked one eye open and squinted at Billy. “What? Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Billy said, looking away and running a nervous hand through his hair. He was so bad at this kind of thing. “You just… you’ve talked about being in pain a lot, lately. Are you… doing okay?”

“Oh.” Billy turned to see Freddy shrug his shoulders. “I guess I’ve been having a bad pain week? Or actually, more like a bad pain month. Damn, usually winters are worse but this summer has been _killer_.” He groaned and threw his head back dramatically. “Am I getting old, Billy? Is that what’s happening? I mean, aside from the whole turning into an actual old man thing.”

He lifted his head to grin at Billy, but his grin quickly faltered when Billy didn’t laugh or smile at his theatrics.

“Billy, it’s fine.” He reached out a foot and poked at Billy’s calf with his toe. “This is nothing new. I guess you haven’t been around for that long, but everyone else can tell you. I have, like, good periods and bad periods. Chronic pain’s a _bitch_ like that.” He paused, and added, “You just happened to meet me during a good period, which like, thank _god_ , because I probably would have just keeled over when we were getting chased by Sivana’s goons if I was having a bad period.”

“I… didn’t know that,” Billy said, feeling a weird sort of guilt welling up in his throat.

Freddy was his best friend, arguably the most important person in his entire world, and there were so many things that Billy still didn’t know about him. There were a lot of things he’d never asked Freddy about—his disability, how he’d ended up in foster care, his life before he lived with Victor and Rosa. It felt too invasive to ask Freddy about that stuff directly. He’d been learning the answers to those questions in bits and pieces, as Freddy offered up the information casually the more time they spent together, but sometimes Freddy would say stuff like this and Billy would realize how _little_ he really knew about his best friend.

Freddy shrugged, unphased by Billy’s sudden internal crisis. “It doesn’t matter now, though! I don’t have to worry about fighting crime while my leg and back are killing me. I can be _this_!” He sat up and threw his arms out, his cape flipping dramatically behind him in the breeze.

“Can I… ask?” Billy said softly. He would backtrack if Freddy gave the slightest indication that he didn’t want to talk about this, but it felt like Billy had been treading on thin ice for so long, and he just wanted to _know_. Wanted to know exactly what it was that Freddy dealt with every day, wanted to know things about Freddy’s past the way Freddy knew things about his.

“About what?” Freddy asked, and Billy’s stomach dropped. Was Freddy really going to make him be specific about this? What if he said the wrong thing? What if—

Then he saw the cheeky grin on Freddy’s face. “You fucker,” Billy said, reaching over to shove him slightly. “You know what I mean.”

Freddy laughed. “Yeah, yeah. I’m honestly surprised you waited so long to ask about it. That’s gotta be some kind of record. Darla asked me what was wrong with me the day she met me.”

“I’m sure she didn’t say it like that,” Billy said. He didn’t think Darla had the word _wrong_ in her vocabulary.

Freddy shrugged. “I think she actually asked _who hurt you_ , which is actually like, grimmer? If you think about it?” He laughed, but Billy didn’t.

He wanted to know who’d hurt Freddy, too, physically or otherwise.

“Anyways,” Freddy said. “It’s not that good of a story. I wish it was something cooler, but I literally just fell down, like, two flights of concrete stairs when I was eight.”

“Fell?” Billy asked. The question was almost instinctive. _I fell down the stairs_ was, like, the textbook excuse for anything much, much worse.

“Yes, _fell_ ,” Freddy said, rolling his eyes. “I know how it sounds, but I really did. My parents lived in a shitty apartment building with shitty concrete stairs and the top step was wet for some stupid reason and I just… fell.”

“And you… broke your leg?”

“My back,” Freddy said, and he said it too matter-of-factly for something so horrible. “I fractured my lower back, my left hip and my left ankle. I think my parents just thought I broke my ankle, or sprained it or something, because they didn’t take me to a hospital or anything.”

“They _what_?”

Freddy shrugged. He was leaning forward now, his elbows resting on his knees, chewing idly on his thumbnail. “They were shitty parents, I don’t know. I kind of don’t remember them that well. _Repressed trauma_ , or whatever. That’s what some therapist once told me, but I think they were just so _absent_ that there’s not much to remember. They probably didn’t have medical insurance and didn’t want to get in trouble for letting their kid fall down a bunch of stairs so they gave me a bunch of tylenol or whatever and hoped that my ankle would just get better.”

He laughed bitterly, and Billy felt a stab of guilt for having asked Freddy to tell him this story. There was a reason he never asked any of his foster siblings how they ended up where they were. They usually weren’t happy stories.

“Surprise surprise, it didn’t heal on its own,” Freddy continued. “Or not well, anyways. I was out of school for weeks and someone must have eventually called cps, a teacher or something, and some social worker finally took me to a hospital where they realized that yeah, not only were my ankle and hip _fucked_ , but if my back was any more broken I would have been, like, actually paralyzed. I still have a shit ton of nerve damage from the fall and from not going to the hospital right away.”

Billy didn’t know what to say. He wanted to be shocked, but he’d heard about enough shitty parents in his years in foster care that he just felt sad.

“And it… still hurts?” Billy asked quietly, waving a hand awkwardly at Freddy’s left leg. In the past six months, he’d pieced together that Freddy dealt with pain, but again—he’d never really asked about it.

“Well, not in this form,” Freddy said. He stood up suddenly, as if to demonstrate, and hopped from foot to foot again, putting extra weight on his left side. “Which is honestly _bananas_. I’d kind of forgotten what it was like to _not_ have, like, a baseline of pain all the fucking time.” He sighed, sitting back down next to Billy. “Not gonna lie, that kind of made things harder for a while. When you get used to pain, you can kind of ignore it? But when you get to turn that pain off it _sucks_ when it comes back.”

“But you take painkillers, right?” Billy asked.

He’d seen Victor or Rosa dole out some kind of prescription medication to Freddy more than once, often after his bimonthly physical therapy appointments. Freddy usually came back from those appointments in a foul mood, so Billy tried to give him space on those days, but Freddy had once caught Billy watching him swallow the pills that Rosa had given him. “Pain stuff,” he’d said with a shrug, and had left it at that.

Freddy grimaced now, though, looking away before answering. “Yeah. I mean, yes, I do, but… Okay, only Victor and Rosa really know about this, and it sounds… bad? But…” He bit at his thumbnail again. “I used to be addicted? I guess? To some, uh, pretty heavy pain medication.”

“What?” Whatever Billy has expected Freddy to say, it wasn’t that.

Freddy grimaced again and waved his hands wildly in an incredibly Freddy-like way. “I wasn’t, like, going out on the streets and buying stuff from drug dealers! It was all prescription stuff. I was just, um, definitely taking way too much of it.”

“That’s fucked up, Freddy,” Billy breathed. Then, at the panicked look on Freddy’s face, he quickly added, “Not that you’re fucked up! I mean, like, that you had to deal with that. That’s scary stuff.”

Billy had always avoided drugs—he’d made some sort of unspoken promise to himself that he wouldn’t reunite with his mom as a drug addict, that he wanted her to be proud of him—but he’d spent enough time homeless or living with ‘problem kids’ that he’d known a lot of people struggling with drug addictions, and he’d seen first-hand how life-alteringly hard they were, prescription or not.

Freddy shrugged. “Victor and Rosa helped. A lot. That’s part of why I ended up with them. I know we all seem like a bunch of goodie two-shoes now—they have that effect on kids—but Victor and Rosa really are known for taking in the problem cases. They’re, like, the last resort group home. And no one else wanted to deal with a disabled brat who, like, _definitely_ had an opioid addiction.”

Billy’s eyes widened, and Freddy caught his shocked expression. “Yeah, I don’t take opioids anymore,” he said quickly. “Which is like, good, because those things fuck you up. But the stuff I take now is like… a lot less effective at actually getting rid of the pain so…” He shrugged. “But hey! Now I have superpowers, so it’s all good.”

Billy didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t all good. It was so obviously not _all good_ , but somehow, despite everything he’d just told Billy, Freddy was still grinning like it _was_ all good. Maybe that was Freddy’s real superpower—unkillable optimism.

Billy scooted closer to Freddy, until he was pressed up against him, and wordlessly pulled his best friend into the kind of crushing hug that only a superhuman could give. For a moment, Freddy seemed shocked—Billy was not normally a hugger. That was something else he was working on, though, and it felt like the only thing he _could_ do in this moment.

And then Freddy laughed, a joyful laugh, the same kind of joyful relief that washed over Freddy whenever he transformed. And then he hugged Billy back, just as crushing, and for a moment he seemed to transfer that unkillable optimism into Billy, too.

They both had pasts that were heavier and darker than kids their age should have ever had to deal with, with even darker pockets that they hadn’t told each other yet and maybe never would. They both had pain—mental and physical—that would plague them no matter how wonderful their family was, no matter how many superpowers they had.

But they did have a family, and superpowers, and _each other_ , and maybe, in some ways, that was enough.

“Race you home?” Freddy said, when Billy finally pulled way.

“Always,” Billy replied.


End file.
